GhostPairing Attack Puts Millions of WhatsApp Users at Risk

An ongoing campaign that aims to seize control of WhatsApp accounts by manipulating WhatsApp’s own multi-device architecture has been revealed by cybersecurity experts in the wake of an ongoing, highly targeted attack designed to illustrate the increasing complexity of digital identity threats. 

Known as GhostPairing, the attack exploits the trust inherent in WhatsApp’s system for pairing devices – a feature that allows WhatsApp Web users to send encrypted messages across laptops, mobile phones, and browsers by using the WhatsApp Web client. 

Through a covert means of guiding victims into completing a legitimate pairing process, malicious actors are able to link an attacker-controlled browser as a hidden companion device to the target account, without alerting the user or sending him/her any device notifications at all. 

The end-to-end encryption and frictionless cross-platform synchronization capabilities of WhatsApp remain among the most impressive in the industry, but investigators warn that these very strengths of the service have been used to subvert the security model, which has enabled adversaries to have persistent access to messages, media, and account controls.

Although the encryption remains intact in such a scenario technically, it will be strategically nullified if the authenticatio

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